Brooklyn in Love

by Amy Thomas

  This process was another bizarrely foreign one to us. We found about a half dozen viable candidates by soliciting referrals from other parents on the Internet. Then we invited these women into our home, analyzed how fresh their clothes appeared, if they washed their hands immediately upon entering (I was still so anxious about someone from the outside coming in and infecting the peanut’s pristine system with germs), and if they could look me in the eye and respond articulately to my barrage of carefully researched questions. I scrutinized how they interacted with the peanut and, indeed, whether they did, as some didn’t even acknowledge her. Most of all, I was checking for that gut feeling. I wanted to know in my heart, head, and bones that our nanny was going to be the best choice for the peanut.

  Such were my anxious thoughts as the last weeks of maternity leave ticked by. With the end looming before me, at least I was figuring this stuff out. I had conquered the breast pump and was slowly building a stash of breast milk in the freezer. I had even forced myself to go out to lunch one day so I could face the fear of breastfeeding for the first time in public. I had done some online shopping and could envision myself resuming professional duties at the office. And after several weeks of searching, interviewing, and deliberating, we found our nanny. I first left the peanut with her for two hours, then four, then six, getting used to what it felt like to entrust our baby girl with another caregiver. I was doing everything my type-A brain could think of to get ready to go to work again, and according to my checklist, I was ready. But apparently my psyche never got the memo.

  • • •

  Of Paris, I used to say I experienced the highest highs and lowest lows of my life. I now realized being a new mom was ten times as intense. It was such incredible joy and love, mixed with some of the deepest challenges and darkest moments. In hindsight, it’s not surprising that two weeks before I was to return to work, I lost it. After months of devoting myself so wholly to doing the best I could with the peanut and semisuccessfully navigating the mix of emotions that went with it, something snapped inside of me.

  It started as just another ordinary-extraordinary day. Andrew was at work and had dinner plans in the evening, so he’d be gone later than usual. The peanut and I enjoyed our hours together, me doing laundry and breastfeeding, her doing tummy time and eating. Every so often, I felt a wave of emotion that was a little sharper and more overwhelming than usual. At one point, as I gently lowered the peanut onto her activity mat on the floor, I dropped her. She was only about four inches off the ground, but her startled cries and the thud of her hitting tore through my chest. I was a wreck. I felt incompetent. I kept willing the tears to go away, but as day turned to evening, I couldn’t contain them anymore. They were no longer waves of emotions; they were tsunamis. By the time I tried to read her On the Night You Were Born, one of the dozens of belovedly sappy baby books in regular rotation at bedtime, I started crying—really crying. Heaving sobs that I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t get the words of the book out. I couldn’t see through my tears. I thought was going crazy.

  The reality was, all those weeks of being at home with no outside obligations, just me and my girl cuddled on the couch, were soon to be—poof—over. Four glorious months of being with that little creature 24/7, her protector and provider; just the two of us, figuring things out together, being so dependent on one another—they were never to be again. It had been such a precious experience and, I realized, I just didn’t want maternity leave to be over. As cut off from the world as I’d been, as physically and culturally stunted as I was, as depleting as the daily tasks could be, that time with the peanut had been nothing short of magic. I had spent more consistent time with her than anyone in my life. We’d never have that much uninterrupted time together again. She would never be that little again. It slayed me that it would be no more.

  When Andrew came home, I clung to him in the entryway, trying to explain what was wrong with me. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t articulate my feelings. All I could really express was that I was so sad. I was also trying to reassure him that, even though I could barely speak because I was crying so hard, everything was okay, with both the peanut and me.

  Because I knew that it was. I knew maternity leave was precious in part because it was finite. If I had been going to lose my autonomy and ambition completely, if I had had no creative or professional outlet to eventually look forward to, I probably would have gone batty. And while my love for the peanut was overwhelming, it wasn’t going anywhere. I knew it would only grow as she grew bigger, day by day, and become just as dependent on the nanny as me and Andrew. But for now, she was soundly sleeping in her crib, and I just had to quell this cocktail of anxiety, fear, sorrow, and devotion. I knew these things, but what I felt that night was so different. Andrew held me until I stopped crying and finally drifted off to sleep.

  After that small taste of postpartum depression, which I realized I was so lucky not to have suffered from, I started feeling like I could do it. I could let go of the beautiful experience it had been, knowing I would carry it in my heart forever. Knowing there were many new beginnings for me and the peanut in the years ahead and it would be ever more beautiful. For now, it was time to return to work. To reunite with my colleagues. To welcome a new routine and use those rusty creative parts of my brain again. And, who knew? Maybe I’d even get back to writing.

  THE BEST CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES IN TOWN

  Where to begin. How to evaluate. Why do we have to choose just one? There are so many amazing cookies in this big, beautiful city and the task of choosing the best is too difficult. To cap the madness, let’s just talk about chocolate chip cookies.

  Ever since my friend Julie introduced me to the six-ounce dense and chocolaty cookies at Levain Bakery on the Upper West Side, they have been my favorite. Along with melty semisweet chips, they’re packed with walnuts and have a thickly undercooked, cakey texture that sends my heart soaring.

  City Bakery in the Flatiron District makes chocolate chip cookies that are thin and flat, the antithesis of Levain’s. Their addictive crunchy texture is slick with butter, gritty from sugar, and studded with big hunks of chocolate. Naughty.

  Just one look, and you know Smile to Go in SoHo has the salty-sweet technique down to perfection. Each cookie’s surface features four to six perfectly circular disks of chocolate that are little magnets for flaked sea salt, giving each bite a one-two punch.

  Maman came to town when I was on maternity leave and quickly became another obsession. This Franco-American bakery, with locations in SoHo, Tribeca, and Greenpoint, layers their chocolate chip cookie with macadamia nuts, almonds, and walnuts, and sometimes pretzels, because why not?

  In addition to his own chunks of rich, 60 percent dark chocolate, the secret weapon to French chocolatier Jacques Torres’s cookies is a warming apparatus. When you get a cookie at one of his chocolate shops, you can be assured that your treat will be warm, gooey, and leave streaks of chocolate on your greedy little fingers.

  CHAPTER 13

  Afternoon Delights

  Day by day, month by month, normalcy was restored. Is restored. My new life of sleep deprivation, emotional turbulence, and mad love is the new reality. As they say, having a kid changes everything.

  I ended up going back to work a week before my maternity leave ended. The agency was in a new business pitch for a legendary skin cream that costs as much as a week’s worth of groceries, and the managing director called to see if I could help out. I reluctantly agreed, and it set the tone for my first month back at the office. For once that first pitch was over, there was another. And then another. Between the intensity and pace of work, the rude reintroduction to commuting, and dealing emotionally with suddenly being separated from the peanut, it nearly did me in.

  New business pitches are notoriously manic, called only somewhat facetiously “pitch theater.” You’re tasked with coming up with amazing work in a short amount of time. Not just smart, creati
ve ideas, but ones that are going to be “groundbreaking” and “revolutionary.” Ones that will “go viral” and “disrupt the status quo.” They obviously need to be “out of the box” and “break through the clutter.” In other words, the client expectations and internal scrutiny are absurd. We’d be in meetings every evening at six o’clock, reviewing the day’s work. I wanted to sound and appear like a competent, committed creative leader, but inside I was screaming: Who cares about this cream’s magic ingredient? Why are we quibbling about “radiant” versus “luminous” when exactly .005 percent of the population will ever read the copy? Don’t you guys realize: the peanut is hungry?! Though I was fortunate enough to work with enlightened people who intuited my distress and told me to go as the minute hand crept farther past the hour, it was stressful to say the least. As badly as I wanted to get home, I felt like a slacker leaving those meetings night after night.

  Even after that initial pitch phase, I struggled to put on a brave face and appear unfazed by the internal chaos of my mind. I literally ran to and from the subway every day—which wasn’t a bad thing, since I hadn’t worked out in five months, but it wasn’t exactly a healthy emotional place. I always felt behind. Always pulled between two places. As anxious as I was about how the peanut was doing without me, I worried about how I was doing at my job. Was everyone taking me seriously? Had I lost my touch? Was I good enough?

  Adding to the stress was my new responsibility at work: pumping. I really believed the peanut would be stronger, healthier, and better for life if she had only breast milk in her pristine little system for the first six months (who you calling a Teat Nazi?). And she was a voracious eater. My stockpile of breast milk in the freezer was quickly dwindling. So two or three times a day, I’d scamper off to an oversized closet that HR had designated as a pump room, strip from the waist up, and hook up these god-awful contraptions to my breasts, flipping the switch of a compact motorized pump that would milk me for all I was worth. If my colleagues were onto why I mysteriously disappeared for chunks of time throughout the day, they at least pretended not to be, preserving my last tiny shred of dignity.

  Over time—albeit a long time—it got better. Or rather I just got better with the idea of being a working mom, trying to reconcile having both a demanding career and a baby—and, not for nothing, a new and fabulous husband. It was at least a year before I didn’t have a mini panic attack rushing home in order to feed the peanut, relishing the feel of her soft, downy hair beneath my chin, and spend a little time with her before she went to sleep. Even now, I feel self-conscious when I pack up my bag to go home at six o’clock. I’m almost always the first one to leave the office—that is, if I’m not working late, which is unfortunately a regular occurrence. That’s advertising. That’s today’s workplace. We live in an age where we’re expected to work like we’re not raising kids and to raise kids like we’re not also working. And I, along with millions of other women like me, have learned to just deal with it.

  • • •

  Just as I’ve had to adapt to a new life-work balance, our social life has been an adjustment. It can be cleanly divided into BP and AP (Before the Peanut and After the Peanut).

  BP, for example, a good birthday party was when we got liquored up and sweaty on some crowded downtown dance floor, unironically dancing with about a dozen friends to what millennials consider old-school music.

  AP, a good birthday party includes listening to some hippie chick strum her guitar to a room full of one- and two-year-olds, singing about buses and animals at the zoo, instead of assholes who broke her heart, leaving us adults hands free long enough to scarf down as much pizza and wine as we possibly can before our children spiral out of control and start climbing all over us again.

  BP, Andrew and I indulged our wanderlust, relished spontaneity, and overspent abroad. We scouted out romantic inns and stayed at cool boutique hotels. We made love often and ate dinner late at night.

  AP, we look for hotels—or hospitable friends—with rooms big and luxurious enough to accommodate the three of us and make it worth schlepping a trunk full of baby gear, but not so posh that we’re terrified of disrupting anyone’s peace, pissing anyone off, or ruining that beautiful beige bedspread with an accidental spill of pureed purple carrots.

  BP, we had our urban treks and midday cocktails on the weekends.

  AP, we spend weekends lounging on the living room floor, doing puzzles, building block towers, and having tea parties.

  BP, date night might have involved the symphony, dinner at a buzzy restaurant, and a nightcap at a rooftop bar.

  AP, staying in is the new going out. Once the peanut is down for the night, we bust out our pint of Ample Hills, pour two tumblers of Armagnac, and settle in for a binge-worthy series like The Americans, Veep, Bloodline, or Louie. A couple of hours later, tired and sated, we head to bed already anticipating our inevitable crack-of-dawn wake-up call.

  BP, we duked it out for highly prized reservations and felt proud of the bragging rights that came with dining at the city’s most au courant restaurants.

  AP, we go for the early bird special: seated at six, done eating by eight, home in bed by ten.

  But it turns out, hitting restaurants at such an un-chic hour, without battling those pesky thirtysomething, restaurant-obsessed urbanites for a table, and getting unceremoniously rushed by managers and servers who want to turn tables, is actually a lovely way to enjoy each other’s company along with a good meal. It turns out, getting squeezed from the conventionally cool territories we used to inhabit has been just fine for us—more than fine. Now that everything has been turned upside down and fundamentally rewritten, a big night out for us is a day out.

  While we still had a dearth of babysitters to rely on in the evenings, we now knew our nanny was one hundred percent competent. If we could leave the peanut with her for ten hours a day to go to work, why not use that time and freedom and go out and play? As yet another birthday rolled around (how was I turning forty-three already?!), we gave it a whirl.

  Our nanny arrived like any other morning, relieving us at the normal hour. But that day was like a get-out-of-jail-free card. We left the apartment and were midstream all the commuters—that we weren’t also trudging off to the office was the first of many highs that day. We stopped at Joyce Bakery, tucked a couple spinach-and-cheese croissants inside my bag, and then hopped on the train to the Union Square Regal cinema for a 10:00 a.m. matinee. A movie, first thing in the morning! It was so indulgent, just us and a handful of retirees, enjoying a big Hollywood production—our first in over a year. It was like when I first moved to the city and every little outing filled me with excitement, everything felt new and special. I settled into my chair that morning, enjoyed the bombardment of crazy trailers before the movie along with my contraband croissant, and looked forward to what was next: cocktails and lunch at Gramercy Tavern, one of our all-time favorite restaurants.

  • • •

  When Danny Meyer opened Gramercy Tavern in 1994 with Tom Colicchio (of Bravo’s Top Chef fame), he was going for the vibe of “an animated community hall,” as he wrote in the restaurant’s official cookbook. He envisioned it as a love child of his first restaurant, Union Square Café, and Taillevent, the acclaimed three-Michelin-star restaurant in Paris. He wanted elegance without the stuffiness, exquisite service that was also down-to-earth. A welcoming place for customers to gather, drink, and enjoy the best seasonal food available. And that’s exactly what it is. Gramercy’s back dining room is hushed and ever more formal; the tavern up front is walk-in only and always packed with people who couldn’t be happier to be enveloped in the friendly atmosphere, with the prospect of excellent drinks and dishes on the horizon.

  “There’s nothing better than Gramercy in November” is what Chef Michael Anthony remembers always hearing when he took over the kitchen from Colicchio in 2006. And it’s true. The golden colors of the towering floral arrangements a
nd baskets of gourds that sit on the restaurant’s antique pie chests and cabinets, picking up the bold hues from the twenty-panel Robert Kushner mural that hangs over the bar, create an enveloping autumnal feeling. But Michael wanted to become everyone’s favorite restaurant in every season.

  Michael, who had trained and cooked in Tokyo and Paris, and was working at Chef Daniel Boulud’s renowned restaurant Daniel before Gramercy, had been instilled with the philosophy that if consistency is your goal, you will only reach mediocrity. Which means you have to change every day. You must listen attentively to your team; be partners with your food purveyors, nurturing a deeper dialogue about how they’re growing their food; and push every employee to keep evolving and inventing. There is no settling. You recreate the identity of the restaurant over and over again. This all seems a bit counterintuitive because Gramercy Tavern itself is a classic. People love the restaurant for the very reason that it is tried, true, and familiar. It’s a place that preserves the tradition around eating. And somehow Michael has managed to protect the integrity of the restaurant while refusing to cook the same things over and over.

  “There are no real signature dishes on the menu,” he states emphatically. Gramercy may rotate things that were created years ago, but they’re revisited at different times, in different seasons, evolving with ingredients and inspiration that come from the team in the kitchen. To support the needs of this ever-changing credo, Michael created several in-house programs at Gramercy, including a pasta program.